Breakups tend to follow a few predictable scripts, whether it’s an ominous “we need to talk” in the living room, a tense phone call, or, if someone’s particularly terrible, a text. But apparently, some men take them to new heights (literally), ending relationships mid-hike on mountaintops, which reads like the plot to a true-crime series. Yes, this is happening in real life, and often enough to earn its own name: alpine divorce.
Despite the tongue-in-cheek branding, an “alpine divorce” is anything but playful. The name nods to a 19th-century short story about a man’s plot to murder his wife on the Swiss Alps. It entered the mainstream last month after a manslaughter trial involving a hiker accused of leaving his less-experienced girlfriend to freeze to death on Austria’s tallest mountain made international headlines. Since then, the internet has been flooded with less extreme but similarly unsettling stories: women describing how, during innocuous hikes, their boyfriends stormed ahead or outright broke up with them and disappeared, sometimes leaving them miles from help with no cell service or clear path back—forcing these women to navigate unfamiliar terrain while processing fear, shock, sadness, and betrayal alone.
“My ex dumped me…after he took me hiking at night, made comments to freak me out, and I had a panic attack,” one person posted on TikTok.
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“I’m calling out to him, ‘I can’t keep up. Can you slow down?’ and he acted like he didn’t hear me. Walks even faster,” another woman shared in a different video. “That was one of the scariest moments of my life…. I’m crying, distraught, and he’s just sitting in the car.”
Anyone with a shred of empathy would have a hard time understanding why a person would ever do this. And yet it happens “all the time,” Mandy Neeble Diamond, PsyD, a clinical forensic psychologist based in Orange County, California, tells SELF. Though the phrase is relatively new, “I’ve had many patients describe similar experiences,” Dr. Diamond says. “Some were broken up with during a hike, or taken to a different town or city where they didn’t know anyone. Other times, their partners walked very fast ahead of them, leaving them behind.” The specifics vary, but the impact remains the same: feelings of sudden powerlessness, abandonment, disorientation, and humiliation. It’s not just being broken up with, but being discarded.
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Why would a man abandon his girlfriend on a hiking trail?
In many cases, perhaps to one’s surprise, it seems like these breakups aren’t premeditated. Instead, psychologists say the mountain environment might subconsciously make an already difficult decision “easier” for the one walking away.
“Outdoor settings can feel less confrontational than sitting face-to-face,” Shannon Chavez Qureshi, PsyD, AASECT-certified sex therapist and clinical psychologist based in Los Angeles, tells SELF. Ending a relationship with courtesy and grace requires sustained eye contact, on-the-spot explanation, and a general willingness to sit there while someone asks hard questions, gets hurt, and shows pain—things many people would rather avoid.
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All of that becomes easier to sidestep in the great, expansive outdoors. On a hike, you’re not locked into face-to-face interaction. You can keep moving, look anywhere but at the person you’re hurting, and walk away from the responsibility, guilt, and emotional weight of the moment, Dr. Chavez says. (Which is convenient, sure, but also cruel and cowardly.)
That said, it’s not necessarily that this particular location creates such callous behavior, psychologists point out. Rather, it can enable existing red flags to thrive, Golee Abrishami, PhD, licensed psychologist and head of clinical care at Octave Therapy in San Francisco, tells SELF.
Put simply: The kind of boyfriend who already struggles with communication, impulse control, or withdraws when faced with any difficult conversation is the same one who might storm down a trail without looking back, or abruptly end a relationship without much thought or care for the other person’s safety and feelings.
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“We’re not just talking about dramatic or explosive behavior,” Dr. Abrishami explains. “We’re talking about the everyday ability to pause between feeling something and acting on it, and those with poor emotional regulation skills will move quickly to relieve that discomfort.”
While the motivations for an alpine divorce, like any breakup, may vary, the “why” is besides the point, experts say. What demands our attention is its dangerously overlooked impact on women. “A normal breakup hurts enough,” Dr. Diamond says. “Already you’re heartbroken and sad. But an alpine divorce triggers so much more because you’re placed in a place of physical and emotional danger.”
Even in less extreme scenarios—say, your partner rushes ahead only for a few minutes or leaves you to sulk on an easy, flat trail—“the nervous system still perceives this as a loss of emotional safety,” Dr. Chavez explains. “You feel stranded, disoriented, or unable to process what happened because you’re also navigating getting back to the car, finishing the hike, or being physically far from support.”
So let’s call it what it is. At its core, the problems with alpine divorce go beyond the usual pain of a breakup. It’s a form of abandonment, every psychologist we spoke with agrees: one dressed up as poor pacing and bad communication.
Originally published on SELF.
